Fab 50s fashions are the best thing this film has to offer with its story of a woman who works at some shirtwaist dress company who manipulates her way out of the "hoodlum" infested neighborhood in NY she comes from, claiming to be from tonier Boston! Sadly it seems they ran out of a costume budget halfway through, when, in spite of having hooked her biggest fish yet, she starts wearing outfits over again (such as a hideous white stole) - outfits less stylish, strangely, now that she lives in Paris!
The locations/sets are to die for. As is Arlene Dahl - gorgeous - but I kind of find her even more remarkable later in her life on the game show circuit. That's some long lasting glamour she's got! Besides as a young gal she looked too much like Janet Leigh. She married some hotties in her time and offsprang some too. Wow. Lex Barker, Lorenzo Lamas. Mmmm mmm! Not too shabby, tabby!
The film was introduced by a historian reading excerpts from a transcript of a suit brought by AD against the studio over a composite photo made for publicity purposes for which she maintained she never posed (and it certainly isn't in the film) in which someone kisses her nude shoulder. She insisted it was a "wanton" image, while maintaining she was "no prude". The court however found the image "delicate and artistic" or some such... she lost the case. All the same she says this is one of her favorite vehiculars. Well, I haven't seen any of her others but either they were pretty bad or her taste in hotties is better than her taste in pictures!
Anyway, the mitigating finale of the film is kind of a disappointment, as is the general low level of her wickedness throughout. Sure, she's "cheap and horrible" as Mildred Pierce said of Veda, but the whole story is told in more amusing pointed and flat out woman hatingly in some of those Hollywood precode films like "Babyface" with Babs Stanwyck (who never married any hotties). "Wicked" pulling its punches didn't really add much to it. Girl, if this is "wicked as they come" then I guess there are no whores, only (violated and somewhat narcissistic) madonnas!
